Beautiful María of My Soul

Chapter ONE

Over forty years before, when Nestor Castillo’s future love, one María García y Cifuentes, left her beloved valle in the far west of Cuba, she could have gone to the provincial capital of Pinar del Río, where her prospects for finding work might be as good-or bad-as in any place; but because the truck driver who’d picked her up one late morning, his gargoyle face hidden under the lowered brim of a lacquered cane hat, wasn’t going that way and because she’d heard so many things-both wonderful and sad-about Havana, María decided to accompany him, that cab stinking to high heaven from the animals in the back and from the thousands of hours he must have driven that truck with its loud diesel engine and manure-stained floor without a proper cleaning. He couldn’t have been more simpático, and at first he seemed to take pains not to stare at her glorious figure, though he couldn’t help but smile at the way her youthful beauty certainly cheered things up. Okay, he was missing half his teeth, looked like he swallowed shadows when he opened his mouth, and had a bulbous, knobbed face, the sort of ugly man, somewhere in his forties or fifties-she couldn’t tell-who could never have been good looking, even as a boy. Once he got around to tipping up his brim, however, she could see that his eyes were spilling over with kindness, and despite his filthy fingernails she liked him for the thin crucifix he wore around his neck-a sure sign, in her opinion, that he had to be a good fellow-un hombre decente.

Heading northeast along dirt roads, the Cuban countryside with its stretches of farms and pastures, dense forests and flatlands gradually rising, they brought up clouds of red dust: along some tracks it was so hard to breathe that María had to cover her face with a kerchief. Still, to be racing along at such bewildering speeds, of some twenty or thirty miles an hour, overwhelmed her. She’d never even ridden in a truck before, let alone anything faster than a horse and carriage, and the thrill of traveling so quickly for the first time in her life seemed worth the queasiness in her stomach, it was so exciting and frightening at the same time. Naturally, they got to talking.

“So, why you wanna go to Havana?” the fellow-his name was Sixto-asked her. “You got some problems at home?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“What are you gonna do there, anyway? You know anyone?”

“I might have some cousins there, from my mamá’s side of the family”-she made a sign of the cross in her late mother’s memory. “But I don’t know. I think they live in a place called Los Humos. Have you heard of it?”

“Los Humos?” He considered the matter. “Nope, but then there are so many hole-in-the-wall neighborhoods in that city. I’m sure there’ll be somebody to show you how to find it.” Then, picking at a tooth with his pinkie: “You have any work? A job?”

“No, señor-not yet.”

“What are you going to do, then?”

She shrugged.

“I know how to sew,” she told him. “And how to roll tobacco-my papito taught me.”

He nodded, scratched his chin. She was looking at herself in the rearview mirror, off which dangled a rosary. As she did, he couldn’t resist asking her, “Well, how old are you anyway, mi vida?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen! And you have nobody there?” He shook his head. “You better be careful. That’s a rough place, if you don’t know anyone.”

That worried her; travelers coming through her valle sometimes called it a city of liars and criminals, of people who take advantage. Still, she preferred to think of what her papito once told her about Havana, where he’d lived for a time back in the 1920s when he was a traveling musician. Claimed it was as beautiful as any town he’d ever seen, with lovely parks and ornate stone buildings that would make her eyes pop out of her head. He would have stayed there if anybody had cared about the kind of country music his trio played-performing in those sidewalk cafés and for the tourists in the hotels was hard enough, but once that terrible thing happened-not just when sugar prices collapsed, but when the depression came along and not even the American tourists showed up as much as they used to-there had been no point to his staying there. And so it was back to the guajiro’s life for him.

That epoch of unfulfilled ambitions had made her papito sad and sometimes a little careless in his treatment of his family, even his lovely daughter, María, on whom, as the years had passed, he sometimes took out the shortcomings of his youth. That’s why, whenever that driver Sixto abruptly reached over to crank the hand clutch forward, or swatted at a pesty fly buzzing the air, she’d flinch, as if she half expected him to slap her for no reason. He hardly noticed, however, no more than her papito did in the days of her own melancholy.

“But I heard it’s a nice city,” she told Sixto.

“Coño, sí, if you have a good place to live and a good job, but-” And he waved the thought off. “Ah, I’m sure you’ll be all right. In fact,” he went on, smiling, “I can help you maybe, huh?”

He scratched his chin, smiled again.

“How so?”

“I’m taking these pigs over to this slaughterhouse, it’s run by a family called the Gallegos, and I’m friendly enough with the son that he might agree to meet you…”

And so it went: once Sixto had dropped off the pigs, he could bring her into their office and then who knew what might happen. She had told him, after all, that she’d grown up in the countryside, and what girl from the countryside didn’t know about skinning animals, and all the rest? But when María made a face, not managing as much as a smile the way she had over just about everything else he said, he suggested that maybe she’d find a job in the front office doing whatever people in those offices do.

“Do you know how to read and write?”

The question embarrassed her.

“Only a few words,” she finally told him. “I can write my name, though.”

Seeing that he had made her uncomfortable, he rapped her on the knee and said, “Well, don’t feel bad, I can barely read and write myself. But whatever you do, don’t worry-your new friend Sixto will help you out, I promise you that!”

She never became nervous riding with him, even when they had passed those stretches of the road where the workers stopped their labors in the fields to wave their hats at them, after which they didn’t see a soul for miles, just acres of tobacco or sugarcane going on forever into the distance. It would have been so easy for him to pull over and take advantage of her; fortunately this Sixto wasn’t that sort, even if María had spotted him glancing at her figure when he thought she wasn’t looking. Bueno, what was she to do if even the plainest and most tattered of dresses still showed her off?

Thank goodness that Sixto remained a considerate fellow. A few times he pulled over to a roadside stand so that she could have a tacita of coffee and a sweet honey-drenched bun, which he paid for, and when she used the outhouse, he made a point of getting lost. Once when they were finally on the Central Highway, which stretched from one end of the island to the other, he just had to stop at one of the Standard Oil gas stations along the way, to buy some cigarettes for himself and to let that lovely guajira see one of their sparkling clean modern toilets. He even put a nickel into a vending machine to buy her a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale, and when she belched delicately from all the burbujas-the bubbles-Sixto couldn’t help but slap his legs as if it was the funniest thing he had ever seen.

He was so nice that she almost became fond of him despite his ugliness, fond of him in the way beautiful women, even at so young an age, do of plain and unattractive-hideous-men, as if taking pity on an injured dog. As they started their approach towards one of the coastal roads-that air so wonderful with the scent of the gulf sea-and he suggested that if she got hungry he could take her out to a special little restaurant in Havana, for obreros like himself-workers who earn their living honestly, with the sweat of their brow-María had to tell him that she couldn’t. She had just caught him staring at her in a certain way, and she didn’t want to take the chance that he might not turn out to be so saintly, even if it might hurt his feelings. Of course, he started talking about his family-his faithful wife, his eight children, his simple house in a small town way over in Cienfuegos,-and of his love of pigs even when he knew they were going to end up slaughtered-all to amuse his lovely passenger.

One thing did happen: the closer they got to Havana the more they saw roadside billboards-“Smoke Camels!” “Coca-Cola Refreshes!” “Drink Bacardi Rum!”-and alongside beautiful estates with royal-palm-lined entranceways and swimming pools were sprawling shantytowns, slums with muddy roads and naked children roaming about, and then maybe another gas station, followed by a few miles of bucolic farmland, those campesinos plowing the field with oxen, and then another wonderful estate and a roadside stand selling fresh chopped melons and fruit, followed by yet one more shantytown, each seeming more run-down and decrepit than the next. Of course the prettiest stretch snaked by the northern coastline, which absolutely enchanted María, who sighed and sighed away over the hypnotic and calming effects of the ocean-that salt and fish scent in the air, the sunlight breaking up into rippling shards on the water-everything seeming so pure and clean until they’d pass by a massive garbage dump, the hills covered with bilious clouds of acrid fumes and half crumbling sheds made of every kind of junk imaginable rising on terraces but tottering, as if on the brink of collapsing in a mud slide caused by the ash-filled rain, and, giving off the worst smell possible, a mountain of tires burning in a hellish bonfire; to think that people, los pobrecitos, lived there!

They’d come to another gas station, then a fritter place, with donkeys and horses tied up to a railing (sighing, she was already a little homesick). She saw her first fire engine that day, a crew of bomberos hosing down a smoldering shed, made of crates and thatch, near a causeway to a beach; a cement mixing truck turned over on its side in a sugarcane field, a coiling flow of concrete spewing like mierda from its bottom; then more billboards, advertising soap and toothpaste, radio shows, and, among others, a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, whose faces were well known to even the guajiros of Cuba! (Another featured the enchanting visage of the buxom Mexican actress Sarita Montiel; another, the comedian Cantinflas.) Along the way, she just had to ask her new friend Sixto the ugly to stop again-a few miles or so west of Marianao, where they had come across a roadside market, just like the sort one might find in a town plaza, with stalls and long tables boasting everything from pots and pans to used clothes and shoes. Half suffocating from the swinish gases wafting into his cab, Sixto didn’t mind at all. What most caught her eye were the racks of dresses over which hung a sign.

“What’s that say, señor?” she asked, and Sixto, rubbing his eyes and pulling up on the brake, told her: “It says, rebaja”-which meant there was a sale going on. A group of women, negritas all, were perusing the racks, and so María, needing a new dress to wear in Havana, stepped from the truck and pulled her life savings, some few dollars, which she kept in a sock, out from where she had stuffed it down her dress or, to put it more precisely, from between her breasts.

Most happily and with the innocence of a farm girl, María examined the fabric and stitching of dress after dress, pleased to find that the vendors were very kind and not at all what she had expected. For a half an hour she looked around, the women working those stalls and tables complimenting her on the pristine nature of her mulatta skin, nary a pimple or blemish to mar her face (the kind of skin which had its own inner glow, like in the cosmetic ads, except she didn’t use any makeup, not back then, a glow that inspired in the male species the desire to kiss and touch her), the men giving her the up and down, the children running like scamps tugging at her skirt-

You see, my daughter; if I was incredibly good looking in my twenties, you can’t imagine what I looked like in my prime, as a girl of sixteen and seventeen-I was something out of a man’s dream, with honey skin so glowing and a face so pure and perfect that men couldn’t help wanting to possess me… But being so young and innocent, I was hardly aware of such things, only that-well, how can I put it my love?-that I was somehow different from your typical cubanita.

That afternoon, she bought, at quite reasonable prices, certain dainty undergarments, they were so inexpensive, as well as a blouse, a pair of polka-dotted high heels, which she would have to grow accustomed to, and finally, after haggling with the vendor, she decided upon a pink dress of a florid design, said to have been styled after the Parisian fashion, with ruffles cascading over the shoulders and hips; a dress which she, being frugal, would keep for some ten years. With such items in hand and after she and her benefactor, the half toothless Sixto, had eaten a little something from a stand, they proceeded east into Havana, the city of both torments and love.

Chapter TWO

Years later, listening to her stories, her daughter, Teresa, long accustomed to a city like Miami, where she and her mother had lived for most of her life, and with her own fleeting remembrances of Havana from infancy, could only think that her mother, arriving from the bucolic countryside, must have found its very enormity overwhelming. Some twenty guajiro families had lived in her valle, in Pinar del Río, perhaps some one hundred and fifty souls at most, while Havana had a population of (roughly) 2.4 million people (in the “greater metropolitan area,” so an antiquated atlas, put out by a steamship line, circa 1946, said). Surely she must have been dumbstruck to see so many people and buildings, and probably trembled at the prospect of spending time there, as if that city would swallow her up.

And Sixto? Once they had made it to Havana’s famous Malecón Drive, and were rumbling along that crescent-shaped harbor, waves, at high tide, bursting over the seawall and onto the Avenida de Maceo in exploding plumes, Sixto, wanting to keep her around for as long as possible, decided to take María for a little tour of the center. The slaughterhouse district, way east of the harbor, could wait: Those oinking and grunting, pissing and defecating pigs be damned, I’ve got a real queen with me!

Soon enough María entered a honeycomb, a labyrinth as challenging as the depths of any forest, for Havana, with its salt-eaten walls, was monumental: a myriad of structures, that city had more than thirty thousand buildings, warehouses, hotels, and hovels, a bodega on practically every corner, a bar or saloon or barbershop or haberdashery or shoeshine stand next to it, and an endless array of alleys, courtyards, plazuelas, and more columned arcades and edifices than María could have ever imagined. With its streets of cobblestone, asphalt, and dirt (roosters and goats and hens in cages in the marketplaces, the smell of blood and flowers everywhere), that city of pillars and ornate façades, of winding alleys and cul-de-sac gardens and statuary-that fellow Sixto had told her Havana’s nickname was Paris of the Caribbean-bustled with people and life. So many people, from tourists to policemen to merchants on the street, to crowds of ordinary citizens just going about their business, left María feeling as dizzy as if she had drunk down a cup or two of rum, a bottle of which, incidentally, Sixto had kept in a paper bag under the shredded leather seat of his cab. This he swigged from while showing her the sights-just getting from one end of Obispo Street to the other, in a glut of carts and taxis and lorries, took a half an hour. Driving for so many years, Sixto thought there was nothing to it, so why not a little sip of rum to ease things when the day’s work was practically over?-just like her papito’s philosophy of life.

And so, as they headed over to the slaughterhouse district, which was at the far end of the harbor, beyond the last of the Ward Line warehouses, Sixto’s manner changed somewhat, though not in a terrible way. He didn’t start rubbing himself or make burning noises, nor for that matter did he try anything with María-she was just a young girl after all, a guajira with the kind of face and figure that make men do and say things that they probably wouldn’t otherwise, and, in Sixto’s case, certainly not back home with the wife, nosireee. He just started looking as if the world was about to end, kept gulping and licking his lower lips, and staring at her like a starved man with a terrible secret. Finally, not able to take it anymore, before turning in to the chain-link-fenced entry to the Gallegos slaughterhouse, he had to pull over; and once he had, he began to cry, tears the color of amber dripping from his eyes and over the ridges of his gargoyle’s face.

María didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on-wondering if she was at fault for his sudden sadness. In his gruff and rustic manner, the poor man was so much like the guajiros back home that one part of her felt like doing something to please him. Back in her valle that had come down to letting some of the men, so weary from their days in the field, roam their callused hands over her face, so they could feel the softness of her skin; and all she had to do was just smile, and that was sometimes enough to make them happier. (Oh, but then there were the others, who, as she got older and filled out, wanted a little more from her, and, looking at her in the same way as Sixto, begged her to embrace them, or to lift her skirt just high enough so that they could see the shapeliness of her legs, which some, so good-naturedly, as if examining a foal, wanted to touch…)

“Sixto, are you okay?” she asked. “Sixto, is there something wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing at all… It’s just that I wish,” he said, his head lowered, “I wish I could go back in time, and get to know you better in a way that would make you happy, that’s all.”

“But, Sixto, I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re so precious, you make a nobody like me wish he could start over again in life.”

And he seemed lost to the world, not just because of the rum or the fact he knew that he probably smelled bad to others, but because he had reached inside of himself and taken hold of his own heart, squeezing it until there was nothing left but his own pain, just like her papito used to.

Or at least that’s what María thought, being such a softhearted girl in those days.

“I know I’m an ugly man and I smell of animals,” he went on. “But, please, can you do me one little favor?”

“What kind of favor?”

“Just give me one little besito-that’s all, doesn’t have to be on my mouth, but here,” he said, tapping his cheek. “Even one on the side of my face would make me feel content.”

He seemed like an animal in pain, an aging one, like those old hounds she’d see on the farm who, no longer able to roam wildly across the fields, would just lie down on their sides, waiting for someone to caress their heaving bellies. She always did.

And because María was grateful for that lift into the city, and even if it turned her stomach to do it, she gave that Sixto a cautious nip on the side of his face, saw the bristles in his nostrils, the spiderwebs in his ears, smelled the rawness of his breath, and felt sad for the man; but wouldn’t you know it, at the same time he couldn’t help but take her hand and move it towards his right leg, where something had crept forward, uncoiling gradually, a stony gargoyle’s erection, like a piece of tubing expanding inside his trousers-was it filled with tears or blood? (Of suffering, or of lust?) At the sight-and touch-of it, her knuckles having grazed that protuberance, María turned away, pulled back her hand, pretending that nothing had happened.

They both pretended, Sixto, with a deep breath, starting the truck again and driving it over to a delivery pen. There he had some kind of discussion with a foreman and, letting drop the rear gate, rousted his swine, some forty or so, into their own little compound, where they were to be counted, weighed, and, depending on that, kept to be further fattened up on palmiche or else led immediately to the slaughter. María, it should be said, for all the animals she had (reluctantly) killed herself on the farm, had never experienced such an overwhelming scent of blood and entrails in the air before. Or maybe it was all their suffering that she was feeling-squeals and blurting cattle cries resounded from the long stock houses inside. Somewhere nearby, and much worse, however, was a tannery, which filled the air with a viscous smell like lacquered rotting flesh, so foul as to turn her stomach. She had to get out. Stepping down from the cab, and feeling ashamed of herself, beautiful María, in her first act in Havana, stumbled over to a corner where she emptied her guts into a puddle of stagnant water-her lovely reflection, with her startling eyes, staring back up at her through the muck, her expression bewildered, as if to ask, Chica, what on earth are you doing here?

Oh, but the workers were nice to her. She cleaned up in one of their washrooms, its flush toilets and spigot taps delighting her. Someone gave María a bottle of Coca-Cola, someone else, a package of chewing gum, and a third offered her a cigarette, which she declined. Then, for an hour or so, she just sat waiting in an office thumbing through magazines that she couldn’t read, though the pictures of Hollywood stars always engaged her. Johnny Weissmuller, still making those Tarzan movies, was the sort of man that always made her wonder just what men in loincloths thought about as they swung through the trees. And Tyrone Power, a dazzlingly good-looking fellow whose teeth were so white she wondered if they were real (though, according to María, as she would tell her daughter a million times, he was not as handsome as her músico.) Once Sixto had settled up, he introduced María to the boss, who, taking one look and caring little about what she could do, offered her a job “cleaning,” as he put it, for a peso a day in the slaughterhouse. She turned him down-it was just too much for her, too much blood and stink, the torrents of flies alone enough to make her sick again.

Afterwards, Sixto drove her to a cheap hotel near the old quarter. And while she had pretended that everything was fine about staying there, she didn’t feel too good about the way Sixto, with a happy look in his eyes, kept promising to visit her whenever he came back to the city, about three or four times a month, he said. So for the sake of avoiding any hurt feelings, she thanked him for all his help and stood by the doorway of that hotel waving farewell and smiling as if she really hadn’t been offended and frightened by what she had seen in his trousers-men saying one thing, but meaning another. Once his truck had disappeared down a street of whose name she had no inkling, María, with her little cloth sack and her new purchases, excused herself and left the dingy lobby of that hotel. She had nothing against the sunken-eyed proprietor-he seemed nice enough in his forlorn way-she just didn’t want to take a chance of Sixto getting any ideas about coming back to find her.

Chapter THREE

Having gone from hotel to hotel and boardinghouse to boardinghouse for most of that afternoon, she found the cheapest place possible. It was off Virtudes, or perhaps San Isidro, or maybe along one of those narrow winding cobblestone streets near the harbor-a place of such squalor that she’d one day get the shivers just thinking about it. A kindly anciana, la señora Matilda Díaz, of portly dimensions, was one of those gallegas whose skin had a yellow pallor from smoking cigarettes from dawn to dusk. With a mustiness that no amount of nicotine could cover, she took a liking to the young woman, an innocent from the countryside with obviously no experience of what living in a city like Havana was about. The men around there, muy suave, or real slick, were not to be believed or trusted.

“You should be careful,” she told María. “I was once as pretty as you, believe it or not. But, as you can see”-and she shrugged-“the passing of the years will wilt even the finest bloom.” Shortly, she took María to a room on the third floor which cost about a peseta a night, or a quarter, a rent that, even in 1947, would have been considered inexpensive (as opposed to two hundred and fifty dollars a night for a suite in the Italian port town of Portofino, where María and her daughter, by then a doctor, were to stay many years later). There wasn’t much to it, just a cot, a lamp, a chair, a washbasin, a speckled doorway mirror, with a toilet and shower down the hall-“Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t”-but, though far from being comfortable, at least it had a high doorway with shutters and a little balcony that looked out onto an inner courtyard and over to other similar rooms.

Used to the countryside, where everyone knew your business, María made nothing of the fact that right across the way she could see one of her neighbors, a lanky dissipated fellow with a wild pompadour and pronounced gut, standing on his balcony in only a pair of calzoncillos. Frying some bacalao over a hot plate, he whistled as soon as their eyes met. From another direction, a woman, obviously a whore, closing her shutters, sent María a kiss off the upturned palm of her hand before going inside to do whatever whores did. (María knew but didn’t let on, while the señora, well aware of the quality and livelihood of her tenants, simply shrugged again.)

Still, María took comfort in having neighbors and in the fact that she could at least open her windows to get a breath of air at night. But María, out on her own for the first time, and feeling frightened by the prospect of having to get along in a city she hardly knew, where she’d have to depend on strangers to help her get around-she was an analfabeta, an illiterate, after all-could barely work up the nerve to go out that evening. Just too much was going on-trolley cars clanging, cars honking horns, horses clip-clopping along, distant sirens blaring, radios sounding from a half dozen windows, voices chattering, a river of life out on the street. Coming from the sticks, she found herself feeling far more clueless than she, without knowing anyone, could have predicted. Por Dios, she even started missing that damned campo, where not much ever really happened, and her papito, who could be a pain in the culo, as well as the farmers and their animals; and she missed her younger sister, Teresita, and her mamá, who were both dead.

Lordy, it was a lonely place.

With her stomach queasy from hunger and her gum chewed down to nothing, all she could do was to go downstairs and ask the señora for something to eat. La señora Matilda was not a stingy woman, and cooked her a tortilla of potatoes and chorizo, but once María followed her into her little suite of rooms, the sight of the absolute filth of her kitchen did not do much for María’s appetite-no wonder, as she later learned, the tenants of that residence had nicknamed it the Hotel Cucaracha. Nevertheless, María thanked her for the meal, devouring it quickly, and, once upstairs, finally unpacked her few possessions: a precious hand mirror, a photograph, cracked and fading, of her mamá y papito on their wedding day years and years ago, a remnant of Teresita’s hair, which she kept in an envelope, along with a picture of them as girls, posed in a photography shop in San Jacinto, the town nearest to their valley, their faces pressed together, María beaming and Teresita showing not an inkling of the afflictions that would take her life. Among the superstitious charms and amulets that really don’t make any difference to the world, she had brought along the rosary that had been her mother’s. Of course, out of old habit, María, before turning in to bed, got down on her knees to pray, her whispers slipping out into the courtyard, from which she could hear many of her neighbors. They were either drunk and shouting or else singing, their voices rising into the night, up towards the sky, with its sprinkling of stars, towards the indifference of heaven.

FINDING A JOB AS A DANCER WAS NOTHING THAT SHE HAD GIVEN thought to, even if her papito had always told María that she was a natural rumbera. At first, it hadn’t entered her mind, but after a month in that city, as a resident of her splendid hotel, with all its chinches and cockroaches, all María had to show for her daily excursions, when she had knocked on every factory and warehouse door, were sore feet and a fanny whose nalgitas had been worn thin by the staring of men. Those habaneros, as she would tell her daughter one day, knew a good thing when they saw it, and being more overtly prone than the guajiros of the countryside, made no bones about letting on to María that she was nothing less than spectacular, as far as the female species goes. In fact, she spent several days toiling at a tobacco factory off Comerciales, another few as a seamstress in a clothing concern, and had found occasional work cleaning up after customers in a café three doors over from the hotel. Now, if she had been hired at all, in a city filled with illiterates looking for work-or else begging, pidiendo limosna-it was because, in the first two instances, those establishments were managed by men who wanted something more than her labors. At the end of the second day’s work, she ran out of the tobacco factory after the floor manager asked her to stay behind once the others had gone and, while pretending to teach her a special technique, pushed himself up against María and reached over to fondle her breast, the pig! The other boss, at the sewing factory, pinched her bottom every time he could, and, because she had her pride, María refused to take much more of that either. (That such a nice-looking man, who wore a medallion bearing an image of la Virgen de la Caridad, could do such a thing!) Her third job, in that little café, el Paraíso, really wasn’t bad. Its gangly, hound-faced proprietor, an older man with a hopelessly immense scrotum, hired María for a few hours a day simply because he recognized her look of hunger; for her troubles, he paid her a couple of reales and, as well, occasionally fried her a thin oxen steak with onions with some papas fritas, which she happily devoured despite that dish’s slightly rancid taste.

But as much as she appreciated his kindness, the dinginess of that café made her feel even more hopelessly lost and sadder than she had before. Something about standing in the doorway of such an establishment, a rag in hand, and peering down the narrow street, half lit by sunlight, with passersby, mostly men, slipping in and out of the shadows and brick or stucco walls in every direction she looked, made her feel wistful and heartsick for the more verdant spaces of her valle. And all the signage-hanging in shop windows, on banners slung across the street on wires, posters and pamphlets stuck on the walls-bewildered María, a sense of stupidity and ignorance churning in her belly. Having no idea of what that café owner wrote in chalk on a slate board behind his counter, left María wishing that all such words would go away. For all her gorgeous looks-Sí, mamá, you’ve told me so a million times before-she envied the brilliant winged birds of the forest back home, who, flying so happily through life, seemed free from such confusions. There in Havana, where every written word seemed a mystery, María’s illiteracy hit her in ways it never had in the countryside.

At least the proprietor of that hole-in-the-wall café never tried anything, but with so little money in her pocket, and having used up the remainder of her paltry savings, she’d head back to la Cucaracha fearful that, because she was falling behind on the rent, her landlady might evict her. After a while she started to pay for her room by cleaning up the place-mopping the halls, scrubbing its toilets, and sweeping out its musty entranceway. Watching life in that hotel unfolding around her, she became aware of all the comings and goings of la Cucaracha ’s tenants, especially the professional women who took men up the stairs in the late hours of the afternoon into the night. One of them, a redheaded whore, always winked at María sweetly. On those evenings, terrified to go out by herself-even in the countryside in Pinar del Río nights always made her a little fearful-she’d pass the time sitting on a bench in the reception area, listening to radio melodramas with la señora, and nice music, by way of live concerts broadcast by CMQ. A musty bladed fan turning overhead, and moths dissolving into dust in the buzzing ceiling lights, they’d converse, Matilda, a widow, recalling the promise of her youth when she fell in love with the man she eventually married, a simple shoemaker from a town called Cárdenas, who died in her arms at the very foot of the staircase after a fall.

“And what is it that you’d like to do?” she asked María, and because María never gave an answer, la señora shook her head disapprovingly. “You should make up your mind, or else find a good man to marry.”

Languishing there in boredom, María was in her room one evening, examining her naked body, smooth and stately and curvaceous in a full-length mirror, something which she’d never had the opportunity to do in the countryside, where the only espejo they had, hanging off a post outside their bohío, was the broken one, the size of a man’s palm, before which her papito shaved himself every third morning. But there she stood, a gorgeous apparition of cinnamon-colored flesh, with breasts so perfectly shaped that even she found their symmetry startling, her nipples dark as raspberries, a shock of black hair, dense as a crow’s nest, shooting out from between her long legs. Surprised by her own grace and voluptuousness, and stepping one way and the other, María had to admit that she looked pretty good, better than she could have imagined. And the mirror? If that mirror were a man, it would have been salivating; if it were a carpet it would have taken flight; if it had been a pile of wood it would have burst into flame, so lovely was María. Of course, she forgot that people could look inside-and, turning, glimpsed her across-the-courtyard neighbor, the fellow with the pompadour, out on his balcón, doing something to himself frantically, a cigarette burning between his lips, his face wincing in ecstasy as she hurriedly closed the shutters.

She came to a decision: seeing that men wanted certain things from a woman like her and that she hadn’t had much luck with finding jobs of a normal sort, María became resigned to taking another route, as so many young girls had before her. And that was to entangle herself in the labyrinthine nightlife of Havana, for which the city was famous.

Oh, if she’d only known just how seedy that could be.

Pero, Mami, didn’t you always tell me how terrible you felt about being alive when your beloved sister, my aunt Teresa, was dead? Didn’t you tell me, after you’d been drinking those Cuba Libres, that you really didn’t give much of a damn about yourself? That even the way you looked seemed a curse to you sometimes, as much as you ride me about my own?…

Chapter FOUR

Even those jobs didn’t come easily. Warned by her matronly dueña, María had to be careful about getting mixed up with the wrong sorts. “And believe me, querida,” Matilda told her, “ Havana is full of them.”

Nevertheless, for days María went to just about every club and saloon she could find, usually in the late afternoons. And while she overwhelmed most everyone she met with her beauty, there was just something about her too precious for even the most jaded of proprietors to despoil, though there were exceptions, some club managers looking her over so lustfully that they made her nervous. That she had never danced anywhere except in a cervecería-beer joint-in the countryside, the sort of place where the men pissed off a back porch, or had any professional training, did not help matters. Most, taking her for a rustic bumpkin or a child of the slums-they just knew from the wide openness of her expression, the gaudiness of her clothes-advised her to go back home, before she wasted any more of her time or, worse, ruined her life. But she had to eat.

You don’t know what that’s like, Teresita, unless you’ve had to go through it yourself, sabes?

At first the establishments she approached were, so it seemed to her, of the better sort, but she had no luck. And so, instead of going to those nicer clubs along the Prado, or out in Vedado, near Calle 21, she started lowering her sights.

AT ABOUT ELEVEN THIRTY ONE EVENING, SHE FOUND HERSELF knocking on an alleyway door in la Marina, the brothel district, not far from the harbor. A squat and corpulent Catalán, with a melted wax face and Xavier Cugat mustache, needed only one look at María before inviting her into his establishment. He called it a “gentleman’s club,” but it was just a sad-seeming place, filled with smoke and darkness and lots of drunken men. His office, at the end of a dingy and rank-smelling hallway, was just as bleak, cases of liquor piled against the walls, a haphazard collection of showgirl photographs pinned to a board behind his desk and, alongside it, a sofa, which emanated its own history of grief. There, as he looked her over, he couldn’t have been more blunt: The job, if she really wanted it, would involve showing herself off, he said. There’d be no stage to perform on, just several tables that had been pushed together in a nearly lightless barroom, over which, in her new high heels and with her new dress off, she was to stride before that crowd, enticingly. He would pay her five dollars, just for that.

It wasn’t the kind of thing she’d ever be proud of, but she would do it out of hunger, her stomach prevailing over her pride, may God please forgive her.

Of course, he wanted to see what she had to offer. When María, trembling, disrobed, at first just down to her slip and undies-she wore no brassiere, didn’t own one-the Catalán, having watched her carefully, told María, “Now off with the slip.” And when only one stitch of clothing remained, that was too much as well-“Quítalo, todo,” he demanded. Sighing, she did as he had asked and was soon standing naked before him, one hand placed over her breasts, the other over what cubanos euphemistically called the papayún. Tilting her head back, in shame, she closed her eyes, as if to pray. “Don’t be afraid, mi guapita,” he said. “It’s perfectly natural to feel a little shy the first time-but just remember, you have to start somewhere, after all.” Courteously and with an almost avuncular manner, he handed her a black silk robe, reeking of perfume, its fabric covered with falling purple blossoms, and told her, “Now, come with me.”

Why she somehow trusted him was beyond her future understanding; perhaps she felt protected by God-she had “la fe” then, and strongly so. Or, as she often also thought, she just wasn’t thinking too clearly: being young and alone and hoping naïvely for the best, as if people were naturally good, will do that to you, sabes? Sighing, her stomach twisted into knots, she followed him into that bar, which, in the style of Spanish taverns, lacked windows, its interior hazy with shifting plains of smoke. Some big band danzóns blared from a jukebox. The room itself (in memory) smelled vaguely of urine and spilled beer, sawdust, stale fritters, and flatulence (perhaps), and was so dimly lit that its darkness almost came as a relief to her. Patiently (and out of hunger) she waited beside the Catalán, who, banging on a pot to gain his patrons’ attention, made a quick introduction in what she took as English-“What’s your name anyway?” he asked her. And then, without further adieu, once she had climbed atop the long table, he yanked off her robe, and María, tottering in high heels, revealed her naked graces before a room filled with men, mainly Americans, who, in their cups, whistled and hooted at her.

How did she feel? Slightly humiliated, and certainly ashamed; as María would confess to a priest a few days later, she had never sunk so low in her life. But as she strode unsteadily across that long table, from one end of the room to the other, she didn’t falter, thinking of those men as no better than animals, whose desires and anonymous expressions would, at least, put a few dollars in her pocket. And so forgive me, she told herself, for I have no one to look after me and I am hungry, amen.

What happened? After those strangers had gotten their fill of what no man had ever seen so closely before, María, covering herself with that robe, sat off in a corner daydreaming about what she would do with her pay. (She’d buy a plate of fried chuletas-pork chops-and rice and beans for twenty-five cents, along with some plantain fritters from a stand near the hotel, a new blouse from one of the corner stores, and perhaps take in a Barbara Stanwyck movie in the center for another quarter, and still have enough left to give her señora some rent money, so that she wouldn’t have to keep on scrubbing floors.) That’s when the Catalán, who had gone from table to table speaking with his patrons, came over to María and, in a rather pleasant tone of voice, told her to come back into his office so that they might discuss some matters of business.

What followed, she never cared to talk about-she’d never tell her daughter, not even during their most earnest talks about her rough beginnings in Havana-only that, once upon a time, it had been her misfortune to have stumbled, and stupidly so, for the sake of earning a few dollars, into a shadowy place. What was it that she’d remember? Back in his office, the Catalán offered her a drink, but she didn’t like her rum in those days-“I was an innocent”-and then he sat her down and told María about how everyone in the club had been much taken by her little performance and that, if she so wanted to, there would be other ways that she, a most beautiful young woman, could earn money. How so? she asked.

“By being nice to those fellows, that’s all,” he told her.

“Señor,” she said, without much deliberation. “All I want is my pay. I’ve done what you wanted me to do.”

But he just smiled and, stepping towards her, his expression changing, grabbed hold of her hair in his fist and, tightening his grip, asked her: “And who the hell do you think you are?” Then he slapped María’s face with the back of his hand and threw her down on the settee near his desk. To her horror, as she looked up to heaven for assistance, he undid his belt. At first she thought he was going to beat her, the way her papito sometimes did-she wasn’t always a well-behaved daughter-but, no, he wanted something else. Letting drop his linen trousers and his (rank-smelling) undershorts below his knees, he stood before her with his somewhat dense but not particularly long ardor in hand; truth be told, it seemed dwarfish, compared with the immensity of his belly. He then proceeded to do his best to deflower her, his enormous corpulence slamming achingly against her hip bones, his body sweating, his breathing labored-he was one of those grossly overweight men who, because of heft, thought himself a Hercules when it was far from the truth. She’d also recall that he wore a lilac aftershave.

But did he succeed? Screaming-surely, they heard her in the club-she fought him until her body was covered in bruises, his face and back with scratches. She prayed for her life, prayed to El Señor, who watches over the forlorn, until, in an instant, she was reprieved. Or to put it differently, until, in the throes of extreme physical exertion, some horrible and paralyzing pain seized the right side of the Catalán’s body-she was, without knowing it, a morena fatal after all. Unable to breathe, or even to lift his arms, he slumped over, beside María. When he asked her desperately for a glass of water, suspirando mucho, mucho, María, may God forgive her, told him to go to hell. And when he asked her again, as she gathered her clothes, María, a practical guajira, answered, “Okay, but tell me, where are my five dollars?”

“En los bolsillos de mis pantalones,” he told her, gasping. So she rifled through his trousers pockets, encountering a stiletto, several condoms, some cards for his club-if she had been able to read she would have known that his establishment was called “El Savoy, a place for gentlemans [sic]”-and then she came to a clump of bills: from this she removed five American dollar bills. And then, because she’d been struggling lately, she availed herself of the rest, in both Cuban and American currency, which were equal in value, may God forgive her. Then, dressing, she made her way out.

LEAVING THAT ESTABLISHMENT, MARÍA HEARD NEITHER SONOROUS violins nor longing melodies echoing around her; nor any tremulous baritone voice, with its saintly inflections, confessing the greatest passion for her beauty, as if she were the object of devotion in a song of love. What she heard instead was Havana, circa 1947, at 2 a.m., a general din of restaurants, clubs, and distant voices coming from every direction and punctuated by the barking of dogs. Firecrackers-or shots heard in the distance; the caw-caws of seagulls alighting upon the slop barges in the harbor, or else swooping low to pick through the offal left in the trails of yachts. From a nearby edifice, a woman shouted at someone, “Eres un pendejo!” at the top of her lungs. Her high-heel shoes clacking along the flagstones of a placita. A cavalcade of partiers, honking their horns and whistling, in a postwedding procession of automobiles passed along the Malecón. The moon itself, a medallion, with a melancholic face looked down from the northwest, like a sanguine god without a word to say. From some alley, deep in the recesses of la Marina -or was it el barrio Colón?-a half dozen batá and quinto drums were beating. She heard police sirens: then, as the casino boats and cruise ships came into port, buoys and deck bells ringing, smatterings of music here and there from behind the closed doors of the all-night cabarets and bordellos; the skittering of cats and other scavengers foraging through the gutters in search of food. If she could have listened through the walls of some of the less respectable edifices she was passing, a thousand moans of drunken pleasure would have assailed her. If she could have eavesdropped into the cells of the central police command, where, unbeknownst to her, political agitators-the socialistas, the comunistas, the union organizers-were held, half dead from torture and beatings, in dingy lightless rooms, she would have heard them cursing, weeping, and moaning, not from pleasure but from agony.

Still reeling from her experience at the Catalán’s, she walked and walked though the streets of a city she had yet to know better. In an arcade, María bought herself a half-stale lechón sandwich from an all-night stand. Its owner, with his one milky eye and tattered flat boater cane hat, left over from the days when he was a 1930s dandy, tried to act as if she wasn’t the most ravishing young woman he had ever seen (even if she seemed a little sad). He checked her out just the same, as María, half starved to death, scoffed down the sandwich and then, meekly smiling, set off again. After roaming in the darkness of an arcade, and hearing the whistles of passing strangers, María, with her irresistible body, her high and firm buttocks jostling the fabric of her ruffled cotton dress, finally got back to her hotel, with its fifth-rate amenities. Stretching across her bed, she spent the night half feverishly, visited by nightmares and missing the countryside she’d left behind.

Chapter FIVE

Oh, but her story to that point: Just leaving her tranquil valley, midway between the mountains and the sea, would have been enough to rip any heart into pieces; but she hadn’t really been given much choice about the matter. For one thing, in the wake of her beloved mami’s death, her papito, Manolo, had taken up with the most horrible woman imaginable, a hard case from a town along the gulf coast whom he, still an occasional músico, had met while moonlighting with some of his sonero friends at a wedding dance. Her name was Olivia, and he must have been crazy or desperately lonely to fall for her, or maybe she had bewitched him, because she was neither pretty nor softly feminine nor even funny. If she had any virtues, as far as María could figure, it was that she could really cook and Manolo liked to eat, but, even then, poor María, for the life of her, couldn’t begin to find anything else nice to say about the woman.

And Olivia must have known it from the moment they first laid eyes on each other, on the very day she moved in, with her horse-drawn cart filled with chairs and what few dresses she owned. After just a short few weeks, Olivia gave up on all her phony smiles and seemed to take a special delight in ordering María around and establishing herself as the new dueña of that household.

It was the worst for María at night, when she had to listen to them going at it from behind a hanging blanket that separated their sleeping space from the rest of that room, no more than ten feet across. With its floor of pounded down dirt, and its few paltry chairs, its kerosene lamp, and, among their sparse adornments, an altar to the Holy Virgin in a corner, which her mamá had kept, the interior of their bohío did not afford much privacy. María’s cot, built of plywood and canvas, with straw-stuffed pillows, the same she had once shared with her younger sister, was near a back door, open to the selva, that dense forest around them, where insects buzzed all night against the mosquito netting. It was bad enough that her papito snored like a beast, and she was used to hearing his every movement, sigh, his dreamer’s mumblings, the capricious workings of his digestive system, but once Olivia had settled in as his woman, those arrangements became a torment. Whereas her mamá, as far as María could remember, hardly ever made any noise at all, just letting out sighs and sometimes crying, “Por Dios, por Dios!” that horrid bruja Olivia, with her groans and yelps and filthy language, could have awakened the dead. That alone was enough to turn María’s stomach, and it killed her to think that her mamá, off in paradise and watching them in life the way people watched actors in movies, could take in every bit of that hag’s lascivious grunting.

What her dear departed mother looking down from the stars in heaven and shaking her head must have thought!

Well, at least poor papito, drunk half the time or under a spell, seemed not to weep as much as he did before that horrendous creature came along. Just hearing his cries of release and beastly snoring afterwards convinced María that giving one’s body over to a man wasn’t much different from a mother suckling a crying baby at her breasts. Besides, because Olivia seemed to satisfy her papito in that way-he was much calmer in the mornings and sometimes even whistled happily-María couldn’t hate her completely, even if it was obvious that Olivia hated her.

Yet, it was hard to forgive her papito for taking up with such a woman, so shortly after Mamá had left the world. Not a year had passed since her mamá, at the ripe old age of forty-five, had died, slowly, slowly of a cancer that left her blind but still stubbornly whispering about the goodness of the Lord, a rosary burning in her hands (she claimed that the beads of her avemarías, nuestro padres, and those of the mysteries, heated up like embers between her fingers as she prayed). It had been a terrible time for María. She had spent countless hours beside her mother, attending to the messy business of looking after her, and, no matter how much she had prayed, María had watched her mother’s body slowly shrivel up. Before that, Concha had been one of those sturdy no-nonsense mulattas, built low to the ground, her hands strong and fingers thick from sewing and plucking feathers and from holding the necks of chickens and the ears of pigs as she slaughtered them in their yard and made the sign of the cross in contrition afterwards. The sort of woman to throw open the door to their shack each and every morning, as if to invite in the grace of God, she believed that her faith would get her through anything. But in her illness, she had practically evaporated, her limp body, in her daughter’s arms, nearly weightless, her hair falling out in clumps. Dutifully, María fed her mamá soup, changed her clothes, and attended to the white palangana that served as her bedpan.

The most difficult thing for Concha herself, aside from all that waiting, was to have watched the stars slowly fading from the horizon. Even before María’s papito had finally gotten around to bringing in a doctor from the sugar mill, she had been complaining about having trouble seeing things, especially her lovely, lovely daughter María’s face. But once the sky itself had started to fade, Concha, so quiet a woman, and demanding little for herself, had begun to sob wistfully over the passing of light from her life. By the time that doctor looked her over, when she had finally piped up, there wasn’t much that could be done. She went slowly, with lots of their guajiro neighbors gathering daily around her bed, women mainly, joining hands to say prayers in the old-school there-are-angels-and-saints-and-tongues-of-fire way; and while her mamá had been blessed and given her final holy-oiled send-off by their circuit priest, Father Alonso, who would ride into their hamlet on a donkey, clanging a bell, her eyes, which had turned into pearls, sometimes welled over with fear. Nobody, not even the most religious cubana, wanted to die.

And she would clutch her daughter’s hand as tightly as she could manage, begging María to hold her close so she wouldn’t feel so alone when the final moment came and she joined her other children in heaven.

Along the way, Concha, despite her unending drowsiness, often reminded her daughter to look after her papito, even if he had been a sinvergüenza to her sometimes, to never forget what she had been taught about God and sins and the promise of salvation; above all, as she was such a beautiful young woman, never to allow any man to use her like a common whore-“No eres una puta, me oyes?”

María, nodding, always swore that she would keep those promises, no matter how many times Concha, having become forgetful, mentioned them all over again. There were other things that repeated: Concha’s trembling and weeping in her arms, Concha’s long hours of complete silence, Concha’s milky eyes seemingly looking off into a distance when there was really nothing to see, her dried lips slightly parted as if in wonderment, Concha, forgetting that her daughter was sitting beside her, calling out, “María, María, where did you go?” Looking in at all this from time to time, her papito, Manolo, shook his head disbelievingly. Barely able to muster the courage to step into the room, he’d ask María, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to leave her mother alone and cook him some food. “And you let me know when you think her time is coming, huh?” her papito added.

María obeyed, day after day, ever so grateful whenever her papito managed to pull himself together and, sitting down beside her mamá, did something to show his tenderness towards her-brushing back Concha’s thinning hair with his hands, or planting a few kisses on her forehead, but never staying long. He just couldn’t take the sight of Concha suffering so and preferred to sit on a crate outside their doorway, strumming some chords on his guitar and sharing a bottle of rum or paint-thinner-strength aguardiente with one of his guajiro pals, anything better than owning up to some of the things he had done to Concha over the years, things that involved other women and that used to leave her quietly weeping at night or that left her eyes reddened while feeding the pigs and sobbing when she thought no one was looking. “Just let me know, niña,” he’d tell María again, as if his wife’s passing was akin to waiting for a train to come by, that guajiro not having the slightest idea of just how monumentally hard he would take the whole business when her moment finally came.

One day, just as the cocks had started to crow, María had been sleeping beside her mamá-well, really dozing, because it’s nearly impossible to sleep next to someone like that-when, all at once, she smelled something like strawberries or perfumed water in the air instead of the rot of her mother’s illness, and then she felt a hand passing gently over her face, the butt of a palm moving over her cheekbone, a thumb pushing upwards against her thick mane of hair-that’s when María opened her eyes, to see that her mamá had stopped breathing. Pressing her ear to her mother’s withered chest, as she had seen the farmers doing with their animals, and hearing nothing, María cried out, “Ven! Ven! Papito! Papito!”

Manolo had taken to sleeping in a hammock under a banyan alongside their bohío, mosquito netting draped over his body, and when he didn’t stir, María went outside to rouse him-it was early morning and thousands and thousands of birds, from woodpeckers to thrushes to silver-winged vireos were singing in the forests round them-but because her papito had, in his misery the night before, gone off to the local cervecería, at a crossroads far beyond the fields,-a place where María sometimes used to dance for pennies-and had come back home only a few hours earlier, he may as well have been dead. Shaking his arms and shouting at him to get up, María nearly started to weep herself. Out of nowhere, as crows began gathering in the sky over their house, he awakened and, hearing the sad news, for reasons she would never understand, got to his feet and, with his mouth twisted into a wince, slapped her so hard that the right side of her beautiful face, already covering in shadows, darkened with black and blue bruises. Her papito, his arms shaking, hit her a dozen times more, his face contorted with anger, as if María were somehow to blame for Concha’s death. Then, coming to his senses and seeing that his daughter, the most precious thing remaining in his life, couldn’t bear to look at him, he fell onto his knees begging her forgiveness. With her eyes swollen by sadness and shock, her jaw aching, María, as a good cubana daughter, grabbed him by the crook of his arm and led her papito to her mother’s bedside.

There, at the sight of her mamá’s corpse, still as a saint’s, her papito carried on with such sudden misery that María couldn’t help but wonder where he had really been all those months before, the man crying out that he was worthless and undeserving of having married so wonderful a woman and saying many other things that left María feeling even more sorry for him, María repeating, while caressing his tightened shoulders and back, “Ay, pero, Papito, Papito…”

Naturally, after Mamá’s funeral, a procession of their guajiro neighbors, and even some from farther away, beating drums and chanting, accompanied her pine coffin to the local campo santo, at the far end of the fields. María took to wearing a black dress and her papito, a black armband, and for weeks, out of respect, he did not once pick up his guitar and sing-nor did any of his neighbors. And, as might happen in any number of rustic enclaves all over Cuba, so obscure as to lack a proper name, where not a single electric light was to be found, once three days had gone by, people began to claim they had seen Concha’s spirit materializing as a floating will-o’-the-wisp in the cane fields at night; and a few of their neighbors, out of pure sympathy and missing Concha, claimed to have seen her translucent spirit drifting through the moonlit hollows of the forest amongst the lianas and star blossoms (those guajiros, sobbing and drunk, were always seeing such things). But María herself never saw Concha again, except in her dreams, and in her loneliness and grieving, like any respectable cubana daughter, she turned her attentions to her papito in his time of distress. Which is to say that María, having made certain promises to her mother on her deathbed, and believing her papito when he swore to anyone who listened that he would live out the rest of his days honoring the memory of his late wife, forgave him for every beating he’d ever given her for no good reason and for every single moment when he had made María feel ashamed of being his daughter: as when she had once watched him, like any other who-could-give-a-shit guajiro, dropping his trousers, crouching down, and relieving himself amidst the oxen in a field, or for the way he used to linger in their retrete, their squalid outhouse in the back, without bothering to close the door, and thought nothing of calling for her to fetch him a Lucifer match, a thin black cheroot between his lips, while he emptied his guts noisily beneath him.

She had other reasons for detesting and loving him at the same time, but now, with her mamá gone, and no one else left in that house-she once had two older brothers, Luis and Miguel, who’d died of typhus and tuberculosis when she was little, and a younger sister, Teresita, gone just a few years before, whose death she blamed herself for-her papito constituted her only family, that of her flesh and blood, even though there were other more distant relatives here and there around the island. Just that fact alone made María put up with all kinds of things, mainly her papito’s rants that women, even young and beautiful ones like herself, weren’t much use to the world except as adornments, and even then they were destined to grow old and rot (he was a little drunk, his eyes twisted, when he said that). Then her papito would say that, as much as he loved her, he would have loved her more had she been born a male. (They would be sitting on crates in front of their bohío, her papi’s best friends, Apollo and Francisco, poor farmers who sang improvised décima lyrics like no one else around there, their already drawn faces further dipped in lacquer after days of drinking the lowest grade of rums, in commiseration with Manolo in his widowed state, just waving off whatever cruel things he said to María and making crazy signs with their big knuckled hands so that María wouldn’t take his cruel ramblings to heart.)

As long as he didn’t hit her, María could care less about what her papito said-she just figured he was drunk, and even if he’d insulted her that made no difference to María, because, no matter what, his eyes were always contrite the next day-they told the truth about how he really felt. And, in any case, as his beloved daughter, the only daughter he had, she believed that he’d fall apart without her. Who else could he sing to in the evenings, out in front of their bohío, when his friends weren’t around? After a night’s restless sleep, who else could cheer him so in the mornings, her papito often declaring, at the sight of her: “When I look at you, María, I forget the misery of my days.” He’d smile, in the same way he once did during their slumbers by the stream behind their hut, or in his hammock (sometimes with Teresita joining them) when she was a little girl, her arms wrapped around him and their limbs all entangled, happily, happily, nothing in the world able to harm them and life itself, poor as they might have been, filled with so many simple pleasures.

…And when he smiled, the journeys they’d made when María was a girl of seven and eight would come back to her. These were daylong excursions to different pueblos in the province, some with barely a road leading to them, and even some big towns like Los Palacios or Esperanza, where he’d find a columned plazuela or shaded arcade in which to perform, Manolo singing and playing his guitar while his daughters, just little girls then, enchanted the passersby, danced to his music, and afterwards collected reales with their papito’s hat. Sometimes, with Manolo riding a horse and pulling along his young daughters in a cart, they’d even go as far north as the foothills of the Órgano mountains, to timber country, and while those trips, taking a day or more in each direction, were intended just as visits with some old musician friends of his, neither María nor her papito could ever forget their tranquil passages through some of the most wonderful tracts of forests and valleys in Cuba. No matter that the going was rugged and sometimes frightening, as when they’d have to sidle along a narrow dirt trail at the edge of a ravine, or it suddenly began to rain torrentially and rivers of mud and stone came sliding towards them from the higher ground, once they reached safety and had entered yet another forest, thick with orchids and air plants, whose luscious scents alone would put them in mind of being inside a dream-they may as well have entered a paradise. And not just of one’s childhood, for their papito himself, with his guitar slung over his back, crossing a meadow of wildflowers, had never seemed so happy as when he was on his horse and in the company of his daughters, his precious loved ones, who, in those days, he introduced to anyone he happened upon as his “little angels.”

This María remembered on her lonely evenings in Havana.

Chapter SIX

After that night at the Catalán’s place, her body felt dirty for weeks, her thoughts filled with disgust for such establishments, the sorts of places María swore she’d never step inside again. But after a few more attempts to find work-she even went down to the harbor, where the only women to be found seemed to be either saloon girls or putas-she began to miss the feeling of having a few dollars in her pocket, no matter how she had earned them. Despising the Catalán while cherishing the prospect of money, María tried to find her nerve again, but she was too timid to knock on any club doors. Still, she had a bit of luck, if it could be called so: it came down to the kindness of a prostitute, living in the hotel, who knew a photographer with a shop on Obispo Street, the friend of a club owner, an entrepreneur typical of that city.

This is what happened: At a certain hour of the day, around four thirty, if you wandered into the Residencia Cubana, you’d find María, having grown close to la señora Matilda, seated by her side in the hallway, fanning herself and sipping from a bottle of Polar beer, while the landlady, half stewed and always with darning needle in hand, proceeded to regale the young guajira with tales of her own youth (born in Vigo, Spain, a transatlantic journey to Havana at the age of five, love, desperation, faith, and despair), ever so grateful that the poor bewildered beauty from the sticks didn’t mind providing company for such a Cuban relic as herself. In the background hummed the radio, and a calendar of Jesus holding his heart, at the center of the wall, soothed María’s soul, but in any event, the two, like turtles in the sun, didn’t really have to say much to each other to feel companionable.

After seven, however, as the shadows elongated in the streets, the prostitutes started to wander in with their fellows, earnest cubanos for the most part, trying to get in a leisurely romp before heading home, as well as some lower-end turistas, who couldn’t help but smile at the young beauty sitting by the old biddy. Of those prostitutes, the oldest and most regal, a certain Violeta, whose mouth seemed fixed in a perpetual scornful smile, had taken a liking to María-“If you ever want to come work beside me, let me know. Men would like you very much”-and on occasion, when she wasn’t breaking wind on the stairs, this Violeta-“Ay, Teresita, she was a whore, but a sweet one”-brought María (and la señora) a bag of greasy meat pastries from a cart on the street and sometimes a cup of fruit-syrup-drenched ice, succulent, chilling, and cleansing. On her way up, she always pinched María’s chin, as if she were an older sister, and sometimes, for the hell of it, she’d slap her bottom, whistling and, often enough, reminding her: “I’m telling you, querida, men would pay to have a taste of this.”

Then came another day when Violeta walked into the lobby with a thin gent, sad faced as José Martí, apostle of Cuba, that fellow, with one dormant eye-made of glass-pulling along a clattering black trunk on wheels, which, as it happened, carried the tools of his trade: a large box camera and various lights. Nearly falling over at the sight of María, who had been filing her nails in the stairwell shadows as they came in, he consulted with the prostitute.

His name was Enrique.

“My friend here,” said Violeta, “would like to take your photograph, María, to display in his shop window… He’ll pay you a few dollars for your trouble, and who knows what other pictures he’ll want to make…”

Knowing the score, Violeta winked, as if it would be easy-every few months or so she herself posed for this fellow in her room upstairs, at a time of day when the windows flooded with light. Violeta sprawling naked on a bed, Violeta spreading wide her legs, her hairy bush and glinting Venus mound laid bare for the world to see, such shots to be sold as “artistic” photographs out of the back of his shop or by old lottery vendors on the street. Violeta was already mildly famous among the brothel set for an accordion collection of such postcard-size photographs, circa 1933, which she had posed for as a ravishing fourteen-year-old girl, new to Havana and willing to do most anything for money. And so why wouldn’t María? The pay would be helpful, and she simply hadn’t had many photographs taken of her back in her valle; but there was also something about the photographer’s somewhat shattered, world-weary manner that immediately put María at ease. He seemed a harmless sort, one of those habaneros, as Violeta would say, who had fallen through the cracks of life but managed to survive anyway, without hurting a soul.

And so a few days later, María, having agreed to sit for the photographer in his studio, over at 17A Obispo, set out in the late morning, the ladies of the hotel, Violeta among them, having fussed over her. It was the first time she’d ever had her hair set in curlers, or worn makeup-not that she needed it-and though the face powders and lipstick seemed oddly confining, as she sauntered along those streets, the perfection of her features, along with the grandeur of her figure, stopped more than one habanero in his tracks: at the sight of her, grandly dressed Negroes, dapper in white from head to toe, bowed, smiled, and tipped their hats her way, as if, in fact, they felt blessed to see the most beautiful woman in Havana passing before their eyes.

At first as she sat before him, in her only good dress, María’s formal side took over. Not a jamoncita-a ham-at all, when he asked her to smile, she could barely manage. For his part, he didn’t really care but put on a show of fumbling about with his camera, making absurd faces, and, with every phrase, praising María’s natural gifts. He, with his one dead eye, allowed the other to swim in hers-dark as opals, almost feline, and mysteriously alluring. “My God,” he kept saying, “the more I look at you the more beautiful you become.” It took him a while, but, as he went about the tedious process of making shot after shot-he used plates-all the while telling her the story of his life-no wife, no family, and never as much as a novia to care for him-his sad and tender manner touched her. No wonder Violeta trusted him. And suddenly she did too, for after an hour or so, María, who’d always mourned the carcasses of dead birds in the countryside, felt that she wanted to make that poor soul happy; and then, finally relaxed, she smiled in a way that seemed beatific.

After a while she began to enjoy the whole business, and got to the point that she didn’t mind it when Enrique, thinking about a sale to a magazine, asked her to put on a bathing suit-he had racks of all kinds of dressing items in the back. Going behind a Chinese screen she squeezed herself into a blue one-piece and then posed, under the heat of those lights, stretched out like Goya’s Maja on a settee. No comment about her lusciousness would suffice, but it should be said that Enrique, long accustomed to photographing the women of Havana, in various modes of dress and undress, would have gladly dallied that whole afternoon, luxuriating in the viscous femininity that, in the heat of that room-and it was ridiculously hot-escaped like perfume from her skin.

That, however, was not the photograph he would choose to put in his window. That same afternoon, he posed her in a virginal white lace wedding dress, María clutching a bouquet of roses to her breast, and supposedly dreaming about love. That black-and-white image, of María, her dark eyes looking imploringly out at the world through a lacy veil, soon graced the second tier of the photographer’s window, and, wouldn’t you know it, as María would tell her daughter one day, men gathered before that display just to get a second and third look of her daily.

“There are women who think they are beautiful,” she once told her daughter, “and while they may be pleasant in some ways, real beauty doesn’t come along too often.” She’d laugh. “That real beauty was me, even if I didn’t know it, back then.”

With so many men stopping into the shop to inquire about the “pretty girl,” it wasn’t long before that face caught the attention of one Rudy Morales, the photographer’s friend, who happened to own a cabaret on one of the side streets off the Prado, the Monte Carlo. It was Rudy who gave María her first dancing job, her audition held in the Lysol-scrubbed reception area of the hotel. Matilda turned up the radio, and to the music of el Trío Matamoros, María performed in the rumba style of her childhood, so fluid, so Congolese, so rapturously sensual-and sexual-her hips swaying so convincingly and her skin giving off a feminine scent so profound that, how to put it, Mr. Morales, the sort to wear dark glasses in the middle of the night, breaking into a sweat, decided to hire her on the spot. “I would have given you a job just because of the way you look,” he told María. “But I’m happy to see that you can actually dance, and beautifully.”

Within a few days she had joined a chorus of seven dancers, the stage shows dominated by the fabulous Rosalita Rivera (from whom María would borrow her stage surname), an affable third-tier star on her way down from a not too glorious height, with thighs and belly far too fleshly to be appearing in the spare costumes those shows required (she was, of course, the owner’s mistress, bedding him at his convenience in the small flat he kept upstairs). The club itself, like so many María would work in, was a dump, selling water booze to a clientele of mischievous-minded tourists and servicemen, out for a night of oblivion and tarty entertainment. Its amenities were not elegant-its toilet was a disgrace, and their dressing area, with its speckled mirrors and pungent odors, of leaking pipes and kitchen grease, saw as much traffic as a street corner, the house band’s musicians, waiters, and busboys drifting by their tables casually, as if, in fact, the ladies were wearing something more than just panties and brassieres, sometimes less. (“Get used to it,” Susannah, one of the nicer dancers, told her as María scrambled to cover up her breasts when one of the musicians, a fellow named Rodrigo, happened by and, getting an eyeful of her nicely taut nipples, winked.)

She did not enjoy the cockroaches that sometimes crawled across the mirror, or the rats that skittered in through the stage door and in the early hours of the morning delighted in eating the cotton balls and pomades that the dancers left out, and it was disgusting to find their droppings inside their shoes and makeup kits. (It struck her as a gloomy and claustrophobic way to live: To be indoors at night, separated from nature by walls and passageways and doors, left María missing the countryside and the woods-the very air that seemed as delicious as anything in the world.) And it didn’t make her happy to learn that she had to pay for her own costumes, for every flimsy sequined top with its gossamer meshing, for those bottoms that were two sizes too small and exposed her goose-pimpled nalgitas to the air-conditioned, smoke-filled chill; for the high heels that lifted her stately rump higher and left her feet sore for weeks, her toes growing horns and her soles covering over with scales like a lizard’s. (Thank God that la señora Matilda, having become her friend, allowed María to soak in her bathtub with Epsom salts; that pleasure was a pure luxury, and the kind that she never knew back in Pinar del Río.)

The other dancers, who were all about María’s age-Rosalita, at thirty, was practically an ancient by cabaret standards-were nice enough, happy to show María the ropes, but their choreographer, Gaspar, was of a different order altogether. A little fellow, he was one of those fulanos who, working so closely with women, seemed to have acquired some of their coquettish mannerisms; at the same time he liked to lord over them like a tyrant. With his tiny frame, muscular arms, and dyed blond hair, wavy as the sea, he was either constantly clapping his hands, to speed up their pace (flamenco-inspired numbers were the worst) or else putting on a show by tapping at the ladies’ heads with his dense forefinger if they made any mistakes. He worked on their postures, constantly lifting chins higher with his knuckles, and, while holding their bellies flat with one hand, ran the other up from the nubs of their spines to the bottoms of their necks; along the way, he held, brushed, pressed, and touched parts of their bodies with the kind of casualness that they would have objected to were he a more manly, and therefore lascivious, sort. (If he was acting, by pretending to show no interest in them, then he was a good actor.) Sometimes he’d fire someone on the spot for flubbing her steps, send her out into the street in tears, run after her, then bring her back, without as much as an apology about the matter.

He didn’t mince words. “You are the worst dancer I’ve ever worked with-a disaster of the first order. You should go back to the sticks,” he once told María, who would have slapped his face had she not needed the job. “You put my stomach in knots, entiendes? Now, do it over again!”

Not that María disliked him-he was the first to let you know if your work was good, but, God, just getting to that point amounted to a daily trial. For one thing, she learned that there was quite a difference between the limberness of an amateur and that of a professional: the stretches alone were a misery that she never quite got used to. Constantly scolding them about one thing or the other, Gaspar would tell the chorus that they were useless unless, in the midst of a dance, they could raise their insteps to touch their foreheads, because then, as he’d bluntly put it, the gawking tourists might have their dreams come true and catch a glimpse of their young and succulent Cuban vaginas through the glittering fabric of their garments. Such a display of feminine charms, he reminded them again and again, was the backbone of their business. “Now, never forget that, señoritas!”

So for several afternoons a week, María became a reluctant ballerina in training, her long legs rising slowly and her body contorting as she tried to touch her forehead with the high arch of her shapely foot. All that work, which she hated at the time, she’d remember with fondness-given the distance of years, even the moody Gaspar would seem a most simpático teacher-and while it may have been true that María, a sight to see in a skimpy bodice and leotard, could have wrung a chicken’s neck and still drawn applause from the audience, a certain fact remained. During her seven months’ apprenticeship at the Monte Carlo, she, in fact, proved herself an exceptional dancer and probably could have been the star of that show, except for the fact that, as such things went-It is very true, Teresita, that men will take advantage when you are so very attractive-she didn’t want to put Rosalita out on the street, the boss having gotten in the habit of removing his dark glasses and looking at María in a way that disturbed her during those shows. Or, to put it differently, she couldn’t see herself spreading her legs for him just for the sake of becoming a headliner, and so, feeling his eyes drilling into her backside each time she crossed the stage, María simply stopped showing up, even if she would miss those dancers, some of whom were to remain her friends.

Chapter SEVEN

Doting on her and knowing just how special she looked, her papito, Manolo, always made a certain joke: “Where’d you come from, chiquita?” It was a mystery. While Concha had been a pleasant-looking woman with a broad African nose and deeply soft dark eyes, there had never been anything particularly remarkable about her looks, save for a certain gentle piety-you’ve seen that on the faces of those sweet churchgoing negritas on Sundays. As for her papito, with his sagging gallego face, his droop-lidded eyes, he was no prize either (even when María thought that he would have been a handsome man if he hadn’t liked his rum so much). Somehow, between the two of them, they had produced this masterpiece, the sort of little girl who, romping through the high grasses, lifted even the lowest and most forlorn of spirits up. Whenever Manolo took her around, guitar in hand, to neighboring farms and valles, she was as good as currency when it came to getting him free drinks and a little food. And, during the glory of her childhood, when she became aware of just how thickly and deliberately sunlight moved across a field, and just the scent of flowers sent her to heaven, there was no escaping the fact that, in a valle with lots of other Marías, and pretty ones at that, she and her younger sister, Teresita, for whom she would have cut off her right hand, surely stood out.

She was so pretty that whenever she was spotted from the fields tending to her chores in their yard-feeding their livestock from pails of slop mainly-even the most exhausted of those guajiro farmers, faces gnarled, bodies thin as bone, their skin leathery from the sun, would halt their oxen and call out to her, “Oye, princesa!”-“Hello, princess!”-or “Hola, mi vida!”-“Hey there, my life!” all in the effort to get her attention, as if for the first time, even if she had been tagging along with their plows and oxen for as long as she could remember. Well, things had just changed, that’s all. First had come the blood, then the bloating, the terrible lecture about becoming filthy and having to wear a rag so she wouldn’t drip blood everywhere. Then her body had filled out. It had seemed to take only a few months. Her angelic girl’s figure, turning so voluptuous that Concha, fearful a drunkard might try to take advantage of her one night, made María wear a homemade corset tight around her chest, but, with María hating the thing, that lasted only a while, proving too painful and impractical for her to endure.

In those days, a toothless old guajiro, Macedonio, who slurped through his every saliva-driven utterance, once told her, “Looking at you, I can remember when I could chew.” And when she, Teresa, and her papito went to the nearest town, San Jacinto, some ten miles away, to bring their livestock to market, María suddenly found herself being followed by one or another of the brasher young men, fellows who whistled after her, promised to buy her an ice cream cone if she would only tell them her name, and who, while her papito negotiated with a butcher, asked her out to see a movie in that town’s little theater, El Chaplin. If she refused them all, or hardly seemed to care about hurting anyone’s feelings, it was because María tried to forget about her own bodily changes: which is to say that she didn’t want to let her childhood go.

They had no schools-not a single one of those guajiros being educated-and their papito just didn’t think it worthwhile to make the two-hour journey back and forth each day to town just so that his daughters might learn to read and write. The best things for them to acquire would be more practical skills-like cooking, skinning animals, and sewing-just what a husband would want. Besides, they had enough work to keep them busy. With one day much like the next, once they finished looking after their livestock-so many pigs, chickens, and randy goats (who stank to high heaven)-María and Teresita, smelling of animals and dung, and with feather remnants in their hair, would make their way down through the woods behind their house, along a twisting path, enormous trees swallowing the light, to a gully and waterfall where rainbows often appeared in the mists. They were so happy then, for everything around them was so beautiful: the lianas and birds of paradise grew densely in that jungla, the fecundity of its earth sending up an endless variety of blossoms, all manner of starflowers and wild orchids sprouting alongside bottle palms, whose thorny fronds cascaded to the ground in clusters, hooded violets dangling like bells off vines around them. (The variety was endless: crimson begonias, red-bulbed flor de euphorbias, flor de majagua, purple jacarandas, hibiscus, radiantes, and tiny violets, as well as other peculiarly named blossoms-scratch bellies, burst horses, and chicken-dung blooms, not a one deserving such a homely appellation. Perhaps that’s why, years later, María had so many silk flowers in her home, and why certain scents from the little garden she kept outside her house always made her cry, or come close to it, because such natural perfumes made her think about Teresa, Cuba, and her own youth. No matter how jaded she otherwise had become, María still missed the wonderment she had felt as a girl when each morning seemed to bring even more of those incredible flowers into the world, and gushingly so, as if God, peeking out from his religious stillness, had pointed a finger and made their pistils, tendrils, and petals suddenly ooze from the ground and up the moss-covered trunks of trees, all effortlessly coming into existence in the same mysterious manner that her own body had changed.)

That cascada flowed out of a massive cave, its roof dripping with stalactites, bats flitting in and out of the darkness. While stony drafts of cool air, redolent of guano and clay, came wafting out its entrance-so wonderful on a hot afternoon-they’d slip off their dresses and, down to their breeches, lie on the granite ledge, luxuriating in the torrents, as delicious as any aguacero or tremendous storm. A sheath of water pelting their bodies, the sisters held on to each other the way they did at night while sharing a bed, all the while whispering about how, as little old viejitas, they would remain close forever and forever like angels, amen.

They must have gone there hundreds of times since they were children, with very little changing in their routine, but on one of those afternoons, as they were walking home, Teresita, then twelve years old, in the midst of a smile and midstride while sidestepping some jasmine blooms-“¡Qué bonitos son!”-stopped suddenly as if she had hit a wall. Her eyes rolling up into their sockets, she bit her tongue, her teeth chattered, and her limbs began shaking so violently she bloodied the knuckles of her right hand while striking it against a rocky ledge-all that even before she dropped like a stone to the ground. And with that María fell to her knees, smothering her younger sister’s body with her own, as if to protect her from los castigos de Dios-the castigations of God, as her mamá used to call such visitations of unexpected misery. But they still came floating down from heaven like the black ashes of a cane field fire, no sweetness in the air, María holding her sister as tightly as she could without hurting her, her right hand cushioning Teresita’s head as it whipped from side to side, María’s own knuckles soon bleeding from smacking against the ground in the effort to keep her sister still, a weeping mist settling around them.

LATER, WHEN TERESA’S TREMBLING HAD PASSED, AND MARÍA HAD gotten her papito, who had been strumming on his guitar with a friend, they carried that inocente back through the forest to the shack, where they laid her down on her papito’s cot. Finally coming around, Teresa hadn’t the slightest idea of what had happened-and yet her cuts and bruises and aching teeth and bit up tongue told her otherwise-she just knew. One moment by the grotto, the next in that bohío. The first face she saw, so beautiful and sad and concerned, was María’s, then her papito’s and Mamá’s, a rosary in hand. One of their neighbors-maybe it was Apollo-peered in from the doorway and sipped from a tin cup of whatever her papi had poured to settle his nerves. He smiled broadly, being the rare guajiro with fantastic teeth, as if that would somehow make things better.

Just then that room, where their older brothers had died, seemed the saddest place on earth. Nevertheless, Teresita, always a sweet-natured soul, managed to sit up and ask: “Why’s everyone looking so sad?”

And that made them laugh, even if her sudden illness was yet another of those tragedies they’d have to accustom themselves to. With pure affection, María wiped away her little sister’s tears; and with tenderness kissed her pretty face a dozen times over, telling her, as they later sat out watching the stars, “You see, Teresa, everything’s going to be all right, because I love you, and Papi and Mami love you, and nothing bad is going to happen to you while we’re around.” That’s what they all wanted to believe. Local healers, examining her the next day, provided Teresita with some natural calmantes by means of a specially brewed tea containing equal parts of jute, ginger, and cannabis, among other local herbs, and suggested they sacrifice an animal to San Lázaro, but this advice was ignored. Papito told her to drink a cup of rum, whose taste she found burning and metallic, but, even after she had been administered a santera’s cleansing, by means of burning roots and tobacco, as an added precaution, when she began trembling again a few days later, there remained no doubt that Manolo would have to fetch a doctor from San Jacinto or, failing that, from the sugar mill, a day’s ride away.

He’d do anything for his daughters, of course, and though it made him sad to pay the fee-what was it, a dollar?-he truly believed that the doctor, a certain Bruno Ponce, so sanguine of manner, and slightly jaundiced with sunken eyes behind wire glasses, would find a cure. Her papito’s hopefulness, however, didn’t quite work out. Apprised of her symptoms and examining her, the doctor determined that Teresita had suffered from a grand mal seizure (a tonic-clonic episode or status epilepticus, as her namesake, Doctor Teresita, would identify it, from her mother’s descriptions, decades later), a condition related either to epilepsy or to a tumor within her skull. As treatment, he prescribed a twice daily dose of phenobarbital, a sedative they could find at the farmacia in town. Its proprietor, whom María would never forget for his homely but kind face, Pepito el alto, as he was known to everyone, never even charged them for their monthly amber bottles of the stuff, so sorry did he feel for those guajiros with the lovely daughters. (In fact, that wonderful man, a widower, formed an attachment to María and actually took Manolo aside one afternoon to discuss the possibility of a marriage between them, even if he was in his fifties. While such arranged marriages weren’t unheard of, and it would have made their lives easier, her papito just couldn’t bring himself to subject his thirteen-year-old daughter to life with an old man. To the pharmacist’s credit, he never held anything against them; though, whenever María entered his shop to get Teresa’s pills, he became solemn in his demeanor, and, more often than not, while stepping back into the shadows, he’d let out with a sigh. Years later, with a wistfulness about la Cuba que fue, she’d wonder whatever happened to him.)

For a while several of those bitter pills daily seemed to do the trick. Still, with their foul taste, Teresita dreaded the very idea of having to take any medicine, and whether she took those pills or not as instructed, she seemed just fine.

A few months later, several days before the Christmas of 1943, they were out at the bodega by the crossroads, where trucks from distant cities sometimes stopped, dancing for a crowd of rum-soaked guajiros, who were whooping it up on one of those nights when the poorest of the poor pretended to be rich, the tables covered with all kinds of victuals-succulent lechón and pit-roasted chickens and doves, rivers of aguardiente and beer flowing like the Nile, their roosters and hounds meandering about, droppings left everywhere, as if anyone, some dancing barefooted on those sagging pine floors-covered in sawdust in the corners-gave a damn. On that night with their papito in good voice and on a little makeshift stage with a few of his musician friends from around-what were their names?-oh yes, Alvaro and Domingo, and a third fellow, the one-eared Tomaso, who played a gaita that he’d made from a pig’s belly, his terrible wailings on that primitive bagpipe appreciated just the same, those guajiros were having so much fun.

Among the females were those charming jamoncitas in their best flower-patterned dresses: María and Teresita, displaying their youthful rumbas, white blossoms tucked into their hair, and laughing as they turned, spinning in circles like flowers fallen from a tree. In the midst of all that, with the musicians playing, their papito proudly beaming at them, and with the oldest of the old clapping along, and the other beautiful young women of their valle, usually pregnant or on their way to becoming so, nodding at las muchachitas-with all that going on, Teresita, in the midst of a dance, had the second of her serious attacks, falling stiffly into her older sister’s arms and then, after appearing as if she were dead, trembling so violently on the floor that her limbs were soon black and blue. But, la pobre, even that wasn’t the worst of it-the pretty thing lost control of her bowels, coño, a shame of all shames. That fiesta still went on, though with more restraint in respect to Manolo and his daughter, the pretty one, with the wistful spoon-shaped face, who had nearly died and then come back before their very eyes.

After that, it was María who kept after Teresa to take her medicine, whether she wanted to or not, but even so, those fits returned, her body contorting in frightening ways, her eyes becoming blank as stone. Looking after her, María preferred to think those seizures, lasting only a few minutes, would soon vanish altogether because of the medicines (and their mamá’s constant prayers). But they didn’t. Out in the yard one morning, jumping rope with some of the local girls, Teresita, gleefully yelping as she took her turn, their hounds Blanco and Negro barking at her, died again, her eyes rolling up in her head. On another day, they were feeding the pigs and crying out with delight (and disgust) at the way the sows sniffed their feet and prodded their ankles with their moist and bristled snouts, when Teresita, in the midst of a laugh, suddenly turned to stone and fell right down into the swill, but this time, instead of violently shaking, she simply seemed to stop breathing, her lips and face becoming slightly blue. María, frightened to death, smothered her younger sister’s face with kisses until, by some sleight of God’s hand, she came around again, with a terrible belch that forced open the passageway to her lungs.

When it happened yet another time, while the sisters were accompanying their papito to town, it didn’t take María long to figure out that Teresita, detesting the bitter taste of those pills, only pretended to be taking them. From then on, María made sure Teresita actually swallowed them down, even if she had to force her mouth open by twisting her hair back before shoving one of those píldoras in herself. It wasn’t easy. Just slapping Teresa in the face for her own good, in the same way that her papito had sometimes slapped hers, nearly brought María to tears-of anger and grief. She came to hate the way Teresita spat that phenobarbital at her face or doubled over, clutching her belly and sinking to the ground, trembling-not from bad nerves but from the very thought that María, who had always loved her so, had started making her life a misery. Every time Teresita told her “Tú no me quieres”-“You don’t love me,”-or “Te odio, hermana”-“I hate you, sister,” her voice cracking and eyes blistering from the strain of crying, María’s heart broke a little more. (Long after Teresita was gone, those memories pecked at María like crows.)

Guajira sisters were never supposed to be at odds, but no matter how much Teresita abhorred those pills, María remained determined about fulfilling her duties-Teresita was her only sister, after all. And when her sister’s condition seemed to improve and she didn’t suffer any attacks for months, María, despite Teresita’s misery and weeping, felt more than a little justified in her actions. Too bad that her younger sister seemed to become nervous and gloomy around her, as if she, la bella María, would ever lift a finger to hurt her. It took María a while to understand some other things: that such a medicine affected the mente, the heart and soul, in short, that phenobarbital had started to change her younger sister’s sweet nature.

Indeed, that medicine had a bad effect on her younger sister; Teresita’s moods were never the same from day to day. Sometimes she became so timid and afraid of people, trembling not from epilepsy but from the belief, without any reason, that even the most gentle of farmers wanted to hurt her. Her fears followed her to bed: Teresita couldn’t sleep, spending half the night turning from side to side and sighing (and despairing over the aftertaste of that medicine, which lingered in the throat for hours even if she had consumed it with a sweet mango or papaya or mamey or guineo). To feel her sister’s heart beating as quickly as a hummingbird’s against her chest in the middle of the night, as she held her tenderly, to hear her breathing, but painfully so, while gasping for air-all that was almost more than María could bear, to the point that on certain days she would have welcomed one of her sister’s fits again-possessed by the devil as Teresita seemed to be-instead of having to watch her turn into someone she didn’t know.

One day Teresita was saintly, the next all she wanted to do was to stick her tongue out at passersby, or torment the animals, tying cords around their necks and pulling them cruelly across the yard. Whereas she used to show appreciation for even the smallest kindness-“¡Ay, qué bonito!”- “How pretty!” or “¡Qué sabroso!”-“How tasty!”-and never hesitated about saying nice things-“Te aprecio mucho, hermana”-“I love you, sister!”-days now passed when she wouldn’t say a word to anyone. Her facial expressions were affected as well: it was as if she refused to smile and took to crying over nothing; and when she wasn’t crying, she withdrew into herself, as if no one else in the world existed, and never lifted a finger to help around the house or yard, not even when her mamá, with her slowly failing eyesight, begged Teresita to help her thread a needle.

(“I’ll do it, Mami,” María offered.)

As for prayers? Whenever their mamá, in her God-welcoming way, got them down on their knees to give thanks for the salvation that was sure to come, Teresita would refuse, shaking her head and running away-why should she? Neither her mother nor her father lifted a finger against her in punishment. (“Niña,” as María once asked her daughter, “how on earth can you force someone to believe?”) Still, there came the day when things got out of hand. Teresita, with her own kind of beauty, also entered into puberty-and quickly so-but whereas María had been cautious and could care less about having a novio, or any of those birds-and-bees romances, Teresita became obsessed with the idea and started to do anything she could to avoid María’s company, their excursions to the cascades long since behind them.

Well, María couldn’t keep track of her sister every minute of the day, and she got used to tending to her chores alone. Where could Teresita go anyway, aside from the bodega, where they knew the owner and asked him to keep an eye on her? Most of the young men in their valle, respecting her papito, just didn’t want to get on his bad side, and so María didn’t think much of it when Teresita took off in her bare feet in the afternoons-to where and what, no one knew. María imagined her sitting in some lonely spot with her knees tucked up under her chin, fretting-as María, her body in its changes baffling her, once used to do herself. And while she often wanted to go after her, she left Teresita, so troubled by that medicine, alone.

One evening as María crossed the fields on her way to Macedonio’s-where her papito had gone to borrow a hammer and a handful of nails-something, a blur of entangled figures, bending and weaving inside the forest, caught her attention. At first she assumed it was one of the local putas with a farmer-when they weren’t working the bodega, they went wandering from valle to valle, looking for takers. María’s eyes might be put out by Dios, but she moved closer anyway. From behind a bottle palm she saw a stringy guajiro standing behind a woman whose skirt had been hitched up above her waist. María wasn’t stupid. She knew about fornication from the animals, the billy goats being the most insatiable, the males mounting the females at will; she’d seen mammoth horses dallying with their mares, and just about every other creature, from hens and roosters to lustrous dragonflies in midair, performing their duties as nature intended. And there they were, the woman holding on to the trunk of a banyan tree, raising her haunches higher, while the man pumped furiously at her from behind, the way María had seen the animals doing.

Desgraciados, she remembered thinking.

Oh, there was something agonizing and stomach turning about watching it. But she could not look away. She eased closer and, wouldn’t you know it, nearly fainted when, getting a better glimpse of them, as the guajiro, in some kind of frenzy, started yanking that woman’s head back to kiss her neck, and even as a gentle white-winged butterfly alighted upon María’s arm, there was no doubt about it, she saw that the shapely woman was none other than her beloved sister, Teresita.

Two things happened afterwards:

Finding out about that whole business from María, her papito nearly beat that big-boned guajiro to death with a shovel. And because her mother was too humilde and mild, and her papito told her to do so, María, dragging Teresa by the hair out of the forest where she had gone to hide, and loving her so, to make a point, had to beat her too-with the branch of a tree, a beating that left her body covered, once again, with bruises.

They didn’t speak to each other ever again, no matter how often María, feeling badly for her sister, followed her around, asking to be forgiven for her severity, even if she had been in the right. Teresa would not say a word, never recanting, nor for that matter did she ease the burden on María’s heart. One of those evenings, when terraces of violet light went spreading across the horizon at dusk, as her papito, Manolo, sitting out on a crate in front of their house, picked up his guitar again and while María settled her head against Concha’s lap, and as her mother peeled a few potatoes, the beads of her rosary, dark as black beans, which Concha always kept wrapped around her right hand, dangling down and touching María’s face-while such simple things were going on, Teresa, who had gone off to use the retrete, stumbled into the forest and, following that trail to the waterfall, where they had often lingered as children, weighed down the skirt of her dress with stones and leapt off that moss-covered ledge into the depths of beautiful María’s memory and soul.

All of the above occured to her while María had been on her way home to the Hotel Cucaracha one might, with fellows calling out, “Hey, gorgeous, why the long face?”